Frye dropped the girl at her party and the clock in his head began ticking. 1:30 minutes he had, with the place he needed to be about 40 minutes away. It would be close. He galloped back to the car after a rushed hug and brief pleasantries, bolted like hell for downtown.
It ended up taking 34 minutes to get to the spot and Frye was definitely sick: all farty and with fluctuating body temp. Along the way he'd fired off a confirming text:
Fifteen mins. Good?
Flying in his Yaris through the tiny narco-hood streets with thoughts stacking like jets in a holding pattern, Frye was having trouble. He could feel his eyes twitching in his skull...Dude wasn't getting back...One thing to be late picking up the girl...another whole thing to retreat empty...Frye was definitely getting sick.
A generic-sounding beep sequence announced a reply as Frye was pulling up. He read as he un-belted and turned off the car. It was a shitty, druggy, low-everything neighborhood but it was freezing, and just three days after a giant blizzard. Somehow that made him feel safer. Frye thought about weather or not people got robbed in freezing weather, decided probably not. The reply was:
Make it 20. I'm across town.
Disaster, possibly. "20" might mean "50", "100", "1000". His guy had no respect for time. The party-clock was still ticking off in his head and faster than before. Frye was sick. He opened the car door and dry-heaved stuff that looked like egg yolk for five munutes. Then he closed the door, prepared $50, waited.
He'd left the party 40 minutes ago. Frye wiped muddy sweat from his brow and thought about the social graces at stake as regards lateness to children's functions. He sat for 27 minutes, each second of which seemed both interminably long and amazingly brief.
Finally the guy showed, served, and disappeared back into the house. Frye, mega-late, and realizing the guy'd forgotten to take his $50, stabbed the throttle in reverse. By that time he'd been away from the party for one hour and thirteen minutes. Best case for pickup was 20 minutes late. "fuck" he thought, unable to think of a follow up. As it happened, that was the last thought Frye would have for a while.
The car that hit his car was going way too fast for the tiny street. It was also much bigger and heavier than the Yaris. Poor Frye had come blasting out of the driveway, reaching across his body with his right arm, for the seatbelt. At impact his car spun violently through 720 degrees and the centrifugal jolt send him ricocheting off the dash board and out the driver's side window. He landed in a snowball across the street, woke up seconds later in blinding, screaming pain from the ancient rebar once piled on the sidewalk, now forced through his back, out from his chest like a spear.
A few minutes later, an ambulance-and-cop siren symphony getting loud quick, Frye's guy comes out once again, runs over, frisks Frye's pockets (working efficiently around the rebar), tosses Frye's Yaris. There's cash - two 20's, two 5's - scattered around the driver's side. Before sprinting back to beat the first-response, the guy reaches over the rebar once more, this time to grab Frye's wallet, sticking neatly from the center console like a labeled tab on a file folder. He hadn't planned on that at first, but looking at him now, the guy knew Frye was dead, and, as such, would not miss the cash.
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